Web Programming, Linux System Administation, and Entrepreneurship in Athens Georgia

rrdtool is cool

I’ve spent the last few days working on creating some graphs for my website at http://www.gamepricewatcher.com. I’ve used RRD databases as part of several applications like MRTG and Cacti. I’ve done some modifications to those apps, but never dug too much into the rrdtool specific code because it seemed fairly complicated.

When trying to get some graphs on my site before, I initially tried using Cacti. I had it successfully working, but adding new Games and Servers was extremely cumbersome to do with Cacti. I figured this would be a good time to dig in and learn how to use rrdtool myself to create the graphs. That way I can generate them directly and not have to work with an application that wasn’t designed to do what I wanted.

Fortunately, there are some good documentation and tutorials on how to use rrdtool I found the tutorial from Alex van den Bogaerdt to be the best starting place. It does a good job of explaining the basics. From there, I wrote the data-collection part of my code in Perl and used the RRDTool::OO module to create and update the databases.

To display the graphs, I tried installing the rrdtool php module, but there wasn’t one available for my distribution (CentOS). I eventually got it installed, but found that it is poorly documented, and decided to ditch the module in favor of calling the binary directly.

Now, I have pretty graphs like this on my website:

I have been collecting game-wide data for about a year now. However, with the addition of the RRD’s to my site, I’m now tracking server-specific prices in those too. That will make it so that I can eventually provide cross-server comparisons, and compare a specific server’s prices to the game’s average.